London 2012 Olympics: how Usain Bolt's unshakeable self-belief lets him take everything in his giant stride

Neither Zara Phillips on her horse nor Didier Drogba on the streets of Swindon
could hope to convey the Olympic drama to the British quite like the crack
of a starting pistol in the Czech town of Ostrava on Friday night.

The eyes of the world: Usain Bolt draws the crowds before Friday's Golden Spike showdownPhoto: AP

That shot will release Usain Bolt from the starting blocks and leave Britain’s Dwain Chambers heaving in his slipstream.

Bolt is the 140-character, lightning-branded, human- evolution-stretching No 1 story of the London Games. For his usual fee of £200,000 he kicks off his European campaign at Ostrava’s Golden Spike meeting 63 days before the Olympic flame completes its meticulously reported perambulations across Britain.

To see Bolt’s spikes in European rubber will wrench the mind round to the most momentous of all London contests.

British medal hopes will draw suitably vast crowds. But only one contestant can realistically hope to adjust the limits of his species.

“The whole world was watching” is by-the-yard hyperbole. When Bolt hunkers down in Stratford on the night of Sunday, Aug 5 it will be true.

Football’s hypnotic power will endure for a few weeks yet. Euro 2012 will make the Olympics wait. When the stage is cleared though Bolt will carry more expectation than any footballer could ever know outside perhaps of the final kick in a World Cup penalty shoot-out.

Even then the success or failure would be collective. In his lane, with the straight path ahead, Bolt, the pioneer, is as alone as a man could be. If he stops for a moment somebody piles a new burden on him. Because his role is simple — world’s fastest homo sapien — the labels are too.

In Ostrava there was a new investiture: the man who saved athletics. “A lot of people have said it, so maybe it’s true,” he conceded. “I’ve done a great deal for the sport. After Beijing 2008, I tried to put the fire into the sport.”

In Beijing, Berlin (where he broke his own 2008 world 100 metres and 200m records) and now London, the planet begs Bolt to restore the innocence of track and field, so that an awed crowd can believe the beauty of his time-mangling velocity.

In Ostrava, the ghost of all fallen cheats will be played by Chambers, who claimed to be so overwhelmed by the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s ruling against the British Olympic Association’s lifetime ban on doping miscreants that he “spent a week in hiding on a neighbouring island” near his Jamaican training base, as Simon Hart reported in these pages.

So line up the jobs for Bolt: clean-up artist for a tarnished sport, show-stopper for the London Games, world record chaser, Jamaican nobility, island rival of Yohan Blake, post-race showboater and global corporation who must reconcile the austerity of his chosen discipline with the temptations of youth, fame and wealth.

He makes it look easy. Mostly. His false start and disqualification in the 100m final in Daegu in August of last year was the first real intimation of mortality. This, too, bears down on him in London. Filming it, in Korea, was Gael Leiblang, whose documentary, The Fastest Man Alive, will be shown by the BBC in July.

The most compelling passage in this intimate portrait of an athlete who appears to expect a camera to be on him at all times (and has therefore given up on privacy, but without angst) is when Bolt explains how he breaks the 100m down into chunks of time, racing “tall” out of the blocks, allowing himself a look “left and right” at 50m and then knowing 10m from the finish: “You’re not going to catch me. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.”

This impregnable knowledge is his protection against fear. During the filming, Leiblang noticed an inner certainty about Bolt that he interpreted as a kind of spiritual strength.

“He doesn’t care about the camera,” he said. “He’s a free man.”

But nothing in sport comes with linear guarantees. When he has put Chambers and his sob stories back in their file, Bolt must move on to another lucrative meet in Rome, avoiding Crystal Palace in protest at British tax laws.

The Beijing extravaganza laid out a future in which Lightning Bolt, now 25, was expected to go on lowering his own record for our delight. And he shows no sign of wanting to dampen those hopes for London, where spectators lucky enough to hold a ticket for the 100m final can expect to leave the stadium delirious should they witness him beating the 9.58sec he ran in Berlin three years ago.

Any other athlete you could think of would be crushed by this pressure.

Yet the satisfying ker-ching of big money rolling in is not the main source of Bolt’s coolness. He is in that divine state of seeing Olympic sprinters in a rear-view mirror.

Special One show Di Matteo the way The title for all-time most ludicrous sacking still belongs to Real Madrid, who dismissed Vicente del Bosque a day after he had brought a 29th La Liga crown to the Bernabeu. Spain’s World Cup-winning manager had also won two Champions League titles. Legend has it that he was too traumatised to sit on the balcony of his flat overlooking Real’s training ground.

Chelsea releasing Roberto Di Matteo would not be in the Del Bosque ingratitude league. But most clubs would have signed him to a four-year deal by now.

The reservation, clearly, is that Chelsea’s revival was inspired mainly by the players, with Di Matteo merely encouraging them to return to the old ways under his non-confrontational stewardship.

It was a spectacular accomplishment, though, to win an FA Cup and Champions League title after looking like a spare part under Andre Villas-Boas, and you can see why he might balk at the offer of a one-year seat-warming deal to accommodate Pep Guardiola or AN Other. With Didier Drogba already gone and Di Matteo in limbo, Munich was the end of a great cycle.

Only Jose Mourinho, the long-term architect of Chelsea’s victory, and the manager at Del Bosque’s old club, stays ahead of those in power.

Nurture has always been Knight's nature Henrietta Knight and Terry Biddlecombe were racing’s most miscast couple. She, a former biology teacher in a private school, hooked up with he, a Falstaffian farmer’s son who could make a statue blush with his fruity exclamations.

But they were quite a team. Best Mate won three Cheltenham Gold Cups in their care from 2002-04 and Knight’s speciality was the patient nurturing of steeplechasers from the old winter school. A great National Hunt champion, Best Mate was overshadowed by Kauto Star and Denman but takes high rank in the pantheon. Now Knight has handed in her licence to look after Biddlecombe, who is in poor health. Kindness was always her trademark.